In the Italian Chamber of Deputies there is a "Women's Hall". It is dedicated to Italy's political pioneers, the women who were the first in the country to hold political office. In the room hang photos of the participants in the constituent assembly, the first mayors, but also the first president of the Chamber of Deputies and the first minister. A few days ago, a photo of Giorgia Meloni, Italy's first female prime minister, was also hung there.

Anna-Lena Ripperger

Editor in politics.

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On this occasion, Meloni spoke about what she has learned as she made her way up in male-dominated Italian politics, first to the top of the right-wing party "Brothers of Italy", then to the highest government office. Addressing Italian women, she said she had good news for them: being always or almost always underestimated was a great advantage. "Because yes, often they don't see you coming."

Some people must have wondered. Because Meloni's political opponent, the newly elected leader of the Italian Social Democrats, had said something very similar shortly before: "Once again, they did not see us coming." That was on the night of Elly Schlein's surprising victory in the battle for the leadership of the Partito Democratico. She, the outsider from the left wing, had passed Stefano Bonaccini, the declared favourite. Schlein's sentence could have been coined on it.

But it didn't take long for the first to recognize the allusion: to the feminist book "They didn't see us coming" by Lisa Levenstein, an American historian. Levenstein, director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, refuted the widespread assumption in the nineties that the feminist movement was dead at the time.

According to Levenstein, it only organized itself differently than in the sixties and seventies. It has become more international – almost under the radar of the public – and has opened up other topics through homosexual women, people of color and activists from the global South. As a central result of this process, Levenstein sees the Women's March on Washington in 2017, in which hundreds of thousands took to the streets together, not only, but also against the then US President Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands that no one had seen coming.

A gesture from two different underdogs?

That Schlein, as a leftist, quoted such a book did not seem unusual. Some commentators even described it as a "clever reference" to their political roots, the civil rights and protest movement. That Meloni also referred to Levenstein was astonishing. "Elly Schlein and Giorgia Meloni, united by a quote from an American feminist book," headlined the Italian news agency Ansa on March 7. A message that seemed to fit well with International Women's Day the following day, the first in Italy's history with two women in central positions of power in government and opposition. Two women, of course, who could hardly be more different.

Meloni, decidedly right-wing, is against women's quotas and a supposed "gender ideology". She once described herself as follows: "I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian." Schlein, decidedly left-wing, feminist and openly bisexual, countered this confession with her own: "I am a woman, I love a woman, I am not a mother, but that does not make me less a woman."

Some wanted to see in Meloni's alleged Levenstein quote a bow to their political opponent; a gesture with which she acknowledged that Schlein – like herself – had fought her way from the position of an "underdog" to the very top, against all odds. Others considered the similarity of the sentences to be cheap copying or pure coincidence. Meloni knew nothing about Levenstein's book, but only used a formulation that had been circulating in the public debate since Schlein's victory.

Woman from a humble background versus professor's daughter

Still others considered Meloni's statement to be a calculated appropriation to devalue their political opponent, à la: I'll explain to you what the real situation is for women in this society – and who is the true victorious outsider here. As far as the "underdog" role is concerned, even critics have to concede Meloni a clear advantage: As the daughter of a single mother from a modest background, her career was much less predestined than Schlein's, daughter of an Italian-American professor couple.

If one consults Levenstein herself to solve the mystery, her partisanship for Schlein is clear. The fact that the left-wing politician referred to her book on the night of her victory was a "wonderful illustration" of one of her central themes, said the historian of the F.A.Z.: the internationalization of the feminist movement. Meloni, on the other hand, did not know or understand the content of the book, and only used it to talk about "how she believes she was underestimated as an individual because of her gender."

However, she is particularly concerned with the supra-individual level, with what new forms of coalition thinking and organizing feminist activists have acquired in the nineties. But one thing can be clearly seen in the quote episode, says Levenstein: how different the world and gender images of the two politicians are. Whose political offers Italians find more convincing will become apparent in the coming months.